Notes Design

David Macaulay is good at showing how things work (Cathedral, Ship, Mosque, Mill). For his newest book, The Way We Work, he wanted to show how our bodies were constructed, so it was natural for him to think of the human body as a gigantic "machine." So the body is presented like a series of rides at Six Flags. No joke! It's a universe of bodily landscapes and blueprints for life where a duodenum is two stories tall. Protein chains are stacked like Campbell soup cans. Cells are assembled like a social network diagram. Tissue making is organized into a dirty laundry room. Oxygen enters red blood cells on an assembly-line roller coaster, organs get trucked in on semis, and liquids course through the body as irrigation ditches then whitewater rafting courses.

My personal favorite is a bolus (remember that word?) of broccoli being photographed by tourists from a walkway as it plunges down the thorax. And of course it all ends with a "fantastic rectum" (Macaulay's words, not mine) where waste management trucks ship it all away. "We don't usually have the time to look at the smallest details," he says. "We get so caught up in scale we just think we can't understand something so big." But that's not true, he says. "By dismantling it we can observe why it works."